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Contribute to Amarok

Amarok is a large project and there are many ways to contribute as well as many different levels of commitment. So, whatever your skills and available time may be, we can likely benefit from your help.

Overall, the different forms of contribution can be split up into the following categories:

PromotionThe Amarok project, like other Free Software projects, thrives on publicity. Being more visible means getting more users, which in turn leads to more contributors. The Amarok promotion team goes by the name of Rokymotion and hangs out on IRC channel #rokymotion on irc.freenode.net. The following things are some of what Rokymotion works on:

Manning the Amarok booth and giving talks at conferences and other events.

Rokymotion also takes care of many other things, and new ideas are always welcome. If this interests you, join the Rokymotion IRC channel #rokymotion on irc.freenode.net to help spread the word.

Artwork
The Amarok project uses a lot of custom artwork. Both for the application itself, such as Amarok specific icons, boot splash screen and many other elements and for the webpage and promotional material. So if you are a wiz with gimp, inkscape or the likes, perhaps artwork is the way to contribute. To get in touch with us, log onto IRC channel #amarok or #rokymotion on irc.freenode.net.

Testing / Bug reporting
The Amarok code base is always evolving, and testing it for usability and bugs is very important. As is bug triaging (verifying already reported bugs, and removing bug reports that are no longer valid). To have a look at the currently open bugs, or to report new ones, go to our bugtracker and search for Amarok. It is also a good idea to log on to our main IRC channel on #amarok on irc.freenode.net where you can be helped getting started with testing or bug reporting.

Code
As Amarok is primarily a software project, code contributions are always welcomed. There are 2 main ways to write code for Amarok:

Application code: Amarok is written in C++ using the Qt and KDELibs toolkits. While the Amarok code base is quite large, it is also very compartmentalized, meaning that it is relatively easy to work on a small part of Amarok without knowing about how everything else works. A good starting point is to select a bug or personal annoyance and then to try to fix it.

Scripts: It is also possible to write Amarok scripts that expand the application in some way. These scripts are written in QtScript, which is basically JavaScript with access to the full Qt API. Getting started with this is relatively simple and a guide to Amarok 2 scripting can be found here.

It is also possible to write a specific type of script that adds content from a remote source as an Amarok service. A guide on how to do this can be found here.

Before starting any kind of development, it is recommended to drop by our IRC channel #amarok on irc.freenode.net. Please also make sure you are subscribed to the developer mailing list. The source code can be found here. All contributions from new authors need to be submitted to reviewboard. Please also make sure you follow the HACKING guide provided with the source code.

Donations
If you can't help with any of the above we are always grateful for a donation by using the PayPal on the left side of this page. For other ways of donating money please come to our IRC channel #amarok on irc.freenode.net. Donations are mainly spent on infrastructure like our server, test hardware and to pay travel costs for our team members to conferences like Akademy.